René Pape is a star who represents like no other a new generation of opera singers: casual and up-to-date in appearance, hungry for new challenges and open to ambitious experiments. In the musical film My Heart Is Burning René Pape sings and plays…

“The boy with the Wig - Kids on Mozart” shows the fascination of the children for Mozart. In the 30-minute film children have the podium: boys and girls aged between eight and eleven recount Mozart’s life in their own words. In this way, an at times…

A 45-minute feature on the subject "love", taking as an example the relationships between Clara and Robert Schumann and Johannes Brahms. The film presents Hélène Grimaud playing excerpts from Schumann's Piano Concerto with the Staatskapelle Dresden…

Almost no musical work has had such a powerful influence or evoked as much controversy as Igor Stravinsky's ballet score “The Rite of Spring”. The work's premiere on May 29, 1913, at the Théatre des Champs-Elysées in Paris, was scandalous. The…

Franz Schubert's Symphony No. 8 in B minor, commonly known as the Unfinished, was started in 1822 but left with only two movements complete even though Schubert would live for another six years. Since Schubert's death at the age of 31, the Unfinished…

In the eyes of his contemporaries, Johannes Brahms’s violin concerto was so different from everything that had come before that, after the premiere, a critic stated that it wasn’t a concerto, but a “symphony with violin obligato”. In an interview…

The Surprise Symphony is the best known of the over 100 symphonies by Haydn. Its second movement is the most popular and gave the symphony its name: legend has it that the sudden beat of the timpani was meant to rouse members of the audience who had…

In their new series EuroArts presents audio-visual concert guides to masterpieces of classical music. The guides allow listeners to experience and enjoy great music from the Baroque to the present day in an entirely new way by offering a combination…

Debussy’s “La Mer” is a masterpiece of suggestion and subtlety in its rich depiction of the ocean. Several authors have claimed that “La Mer” sounds like nothing before it. As a specialist in French Impressionism, the British pianist and writer Paul…

Robert Schumann’s famous piano concerto is not a traditional virtuoso showpiece but a cooperative venture between the soloist and the orchestra. This new relationship transported the piano concerto into the realm of symphonic music. The German…